Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Thomas Steinbrenner is a robotics researcher whose work focuses on advancing dexterous manipulation and dynamic ball-handling through open-source, reproducible platforms. His major contributions center on bridging the gap between simulation and real-world robotics by creating accessible, high-fidelity hardware systems. Steinbrenner led the development of **AIMY**, an open-source table tennis ball launcher that enables versatile, controlled trajectory generation—a critical tool for training robots to match human-level play (5 citations). He also designed and built robotic clusters for the **Real Robot Challenge**, a cloud-based competition that allows remote access to dexterous manipulation platforms, fostering collaborative research on grasping and in-hand manipulation (3 and 2 citations). By providing shared benchmarks and remote-access hardware hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Steinbrenner’s work empowers the global robotics community to tackle open problems in manipulation with reproducibility and scalability. His achievements include creating infrastructure that lowers the barrier to entry for cutting-edge robotics research, making him a key figure in the push toward open, collaborative, and reproducible robotic systems.